(RealClearPolitics)—That same day, Trump pardoned 1,500 people who were convicted or facing trial for the Jan. 6 riot.
The media’s coverage of these pardons has been dramatically different. Take the New York Times, which describes Biden’s preemptive pardons as a way to “guard” from a “promised campaign of ‘retribution’ by his incoming successor, Donald J. Trump.”
But after the 2020 election, the Times accused President Trump of using his power to “apply his own standard of justice for his allies.” That included Paul Manafort, his 2016 campaign chairman, and Roger J. Stone Jr., his longtime informal adviser and friend. Another beneficiary was a family member, Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
The New York Times quoted this week the older brother of Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died naturally from a stroke the day after Jan. 6. “The message to me is that the United States is no longer a nation under the rule of law and anything goes,” Craig Sicknick was quoted as saying.
News coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC spent 46 minutes and 32 seconds covering Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons but only three minutes and 32 seconds on Biden pardoning his family.
Overall, Biden has pardoned and commuted sentences for a record 4,245 criminals, including 37 murderers on death row. Some of these individuals are mass murderers, child rapists, and torturers who then murdered their victims, and many have never expressed remorse.
While the pardons by both Biden and Trump are controversial, there are big differences between them.
The cases against the Jan. 6 defendants overwhelmingly involved legal system abuses. A politicized Department of Justice brought charges before juries in the District of Columbia that were heavily biased against Republicans and a circuit court that Democrats heavily control. The jury pool was from a district where Biden had received over 92% of the vote in 2020. Prosecutors with infinite budgets prosecuted ordinary people who didn’t have the resources to defend themselves.
The Biden Department of Justice clearly overcharged these defendants. For example, when a case finally got to the U.S. Supreme Court (Fisher v. United States), the court sternly reprimanded the Biden Department of Justice, saying a statute dealing with corporate fraud clearly shouldn’t have been used against more than several hundred defendants. Finally, the Department of Justice never gave defense lawyers 44,000 hours of video evidence. It isn’t a prosecutor’s job to determine what you think might be helpful to defense lawyers.
Trump’s pardons of those who engaged in violence during the riot, particularly those who had hurt police, generated the most controversy. But even here, there was a two-tiered system of justice.
While approximately 140 officers were assaulted in the Jan. 6 riot (it isn’t clear how many were injured), the June 2020 Lafayette Square riot and attack on the White House, by contrast, injured at least 150 law enforcement officers. Despite constant claims to the contrary in the Jan. 6 riot, no officers were killed in either riot. But while the J6 defendants spent significant time in prison, none of the Lafayette Square rioters were prosecuted, let alone sentenced.
While the Jan. 6 riot was viewed as an insurrection against our government, people scaled the White House fence during the Lafayette Square riot, and the Secret Service felt the threat was sufficient to move Trump to a secure location.
Unlike Trump, Biden pardoned family members. After the 2020 election, Biden was critical of the idea that Trump might give preemptive pardons to family members and others. He criticized Trump for possibly doing what he ended up doing himself. The pardons of Biden’s family members entailed possible crimes of corruption and money laundering involving tens of millions of dollars.
Who was more transparent with the American people? Multiple times last year, Biden and his administration promised that Biden wouldn’t pardon his son. After the 2020 election, Biden promised that he would never offer preemptive pardons, such as what he ended up giving his family members. Indeed, he condemned the very idea. By contrast, Trump consistently campaigned on pardoning Jan. 6 rioters.
Biden’s pardons of family members were preemptive and covered crimes dating back more than a decade. The Jan. 6 rioters have met a very different fate, having already faced years of punishment.
Thirty-four rioters were convicted of violence, including overrunning a police barricade. The average person was arrested 43 months ago and given a sentence of 107 months. Few were allowed to make bail. One person, Daniel Ball, was still awaiting trial after sitting in custody for 21 months when he was pardoned.
Ten rioters were convicted of assaulting police officers (Julian Khater, Peter Schwartz, Christopher Quaglin, James Tate Grant, Michael Bradley, Robert Scott Palmer, Ryan Samsel, Steven Chase Randolph, Thomas Harlen Smith, and Tyler Bradley Dykes). They faced an average sentence of 90 months (7.5 years) and have been incarcerated for an average of 40 months since their arrests.
Some of the most severe penalties were reserved for two former police officers (Thomas Robertson and Thomas Webster), who fought their way through the police barricades. They were sentenced to 72 and 120 months and were both held for a total of 48 months.
Many of those sentenced to prison were let into the Capitol by police and did not engage in violence, but they still suffered long prison terms. Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon Shaman,” was actually brought by police to the Senate floor and appeared to peacefully talk to officers, but he was still sentenced to 41 months in prison.
Prison is only a part of the penalties that the rioters faced. Many were bankrupted by legal costs – something Trump’s pardon will never be able to restore.
The family members and others that Biden preemptively pardoned will never face any criminal penalties. By contrast, the Jan. 6 rioters have already served significant sentences.
John R. Lott Jr. is a contributor to RealClearInvestigations, focusing on voting and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today, and Chicago Tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
